My client had the decency to put “pharmerging” in inverted commas and to speak about “so-called” pharmerging. A little research on Google soon tells me that the word is known, and is precisely relevant to my client’s field, so I am not blaming them. I almost don’t blame the twisted brain that thought up the idea. But I do blame the people who have had the bad taste to adopt it as a buzzword, presumably in the belief that it makes them look as if they have esoteric marketing knowledge.

I’m not actually sure when it first came into circulation, so it may not really be this year’s word, but this is the first time I have come across it. I’m willing to bet that I won’t come across anything else with such low linguistic sensitivity this year, so there you have it: my vote in 2010 goes to “pharmerging” as the ugliest word of the year.

Fritz D. had written a letter, and ordered a translation from Angela E.; when the translation was supplied, Fritz noticed that “danke schön” had been translated as “thank you”. He told Angela that he was not happy about paying, and asked her which word corresponded to “danke” and which word to ”schön”; the translation must be mistaken, he told Angela, as there was no “beautiful” to match the “schön”.

Yes, this is apocryphal, but similar things happen in real life.

The company that offers its help in this process (a company not of “consultants”, one may note, but of “resultants”) will be useful to you, because they will shorten the time needed to get to the “go-live”. 

I reasearching this I also found the noun “hire” being used in the sense of an employee. New hires have to be onboarded, it would appear.

Spit, foam and stab is all that I can say.

• expensive
• hard to get used to
• buggy
• often slow
• aimed at those who manage large translation projects rather than individual translators.

I can offer no opinion of my own, other than not being surprised, but I shall certainly be in no hurry to upgrade.

In fact so far I have not seen one single comment to the effect that it would have any value at all for me. Anybody want to make one here?

I had come to the conclusion that rates really have been falling for one, simple reason – one agency for whom I have done a lot of work over a number of years simply stopped contacting me. After around four months I wrote to them, asking if everything was ok. After all, bankruptcies happen, company principals die or get taken ill – there are all sorts of reasons why a source of work might suddenly dry up. Their answer was very simple and very clear: although (they were kind enough to say that) I am “certainly one of their best translators”, my rates were simply too high. When they ask their own customers for the same money that they use to charge, they simply no longer get orders. They would only be able to make use of me, they said, if I could restructure my charges in such a way that I would be getting only something like 75% of my former rate. My relationship with this trusted customer is a good one, and the circumstances make it quite clear that this was not a “try on”. I should point out that I had been charging this client the same as I charge everybody else. On the other hand, I don’t know what their own margin is, and I therefore don’t know how their charges to end-customers compare with those made by other agencies.

The implication was clear enough to prompt me to write to all the clients for whom I have done jobs in the last two years, bluntly asking them whether my current price is a problem. Every single one was kind enough to reply, and every single one said that no, my prices are perfectly normal and perfectly acceptable. All of them but one said that they were simply finding that there is, at present, much less work about, and that companies who need translations done are trying to reduce the amount, postpone the work, or in some other way put less translation out onto the market. The only one who claimed to be as busy as ever is quite a small concern, and focused primarily on French rather than German, so perhaps not typical of my other clients.

There does seem to be still plenty of support for the old wisdom that if people will not pay a decent price, they may indeed get translations, but that he quality will be very poor. If a bargain-basement approach were to become a trend that characterised the whole market, good translators would eventually become altogether hard to find.

Conclusion? I don’t know, but it’s food for thought.

Some of it is promising, there can be no doubt. But some of it is appalling. The translation business, like shopping for gifts, is largely unregulated. There is good quality material available, but it is up to the shopper to find it. As I looked at some of these sites I felt as if I had wandered off the street of high-quality department stores, where carefully selected perfumes, clothes and other desirables are displayed under favourable lighting behind polished glass prior to being sold, gift wrapped and paid for by credit card. Somehow I had found my way into back-alleys where the cheapest tat, knocked-off copies and toys made in the correctional institutions of China were being touted at the lowest possible prices – just don’t bother going back and trying to find the stall again when it turns out that your toy is covered in poisonous paint, is broken, and wouldn’t be likely to work even if it were in one piece. Two examples may illustrate what I mean.

Some time ago I joined twitter, but somehow never quite grasped what the point of it was. (I’m “wildingtranslat”, by the way.) So I recently invested an hour finding some people to “follow”. One of them, going under the name of LyricLabs, was generating a huge number of tweets about translation jobs involving every thinkable language combination. I clicked on one or two, to see what the deal was, but in every case I found no details about the job, but was just led instead to the company’s main website. I held out no hope, but for the sake of being annoying I mailed them to ask why this was. To my surprise I got no less than two answers:

Dear alex
Twitter is to get keyword listing in SE. Have told my office to be in touch with you
Rgds

and

Dear Mr. Alex
Thanks for contacting us. We have rooted our twitter links to our website only
Pl. send your updated CV
Thanks & Regards,

You will realize that I have cut-and-pasted these messages, so there is no need to put (sic) all over them to assure you that the mistakes are theirs. In other words

• although the site is run in English, they are not very good at the language
• they are too lazy to press all the necessary keys

and they are willing to admit that

• the job offers are all fakes, and they are simply pumping them out on to twitter in the hope that the links to their own website, included in each tweet, will improve their ranking on Google.

Needless to say, I am not following them on twitter any longer.

As a second illustration, I found what did seem to be an actual job offer on another site. The Word file was available, so I downloaded it and estimated that at my standard rate I would have wanted about EUR 190 for the job, say USD 250. Perhaps I would have been willing to negotiate down, let’s say $200. The potential client was offering between $10 (yes, ten) and $20 (yes, twenty). One respondent had offered to do it for $10, adding (again, I cut and paste – all errors of spelling and puctuation are the message author’s):
“Please allow us to do you a accurate and professional work.”
Someone else, offering to do it for $20, asserted:
“I completed my work. Your document is ready. i already completely translated your file. now tell me where to send you this file. thanks.”
A third respondent, perhaps feeling that $20 really was too little, and perhaps therefore capable of a higher quality, offered to do it for $60, supplementing the offer with the message:
“Hello, I hace checked your text completelly. At my price I can provide Native German Translation and Proofreading by Native English. My service is perfect,check my reviews. Best Regards.”

I now just need a little video of myself walking away, shaking my head in disbelief.

It’s local vs national that makes the difference. A local business can get its leads by networking locally. But a national business benefits from the extra reach and randomness that online working gives you.

The comment I send back was that “In many cases, no doubt. But in my case, it’s hard to be more international, yet I am entirely supply-limited. Once I’m booked, I’m booked, and outsourcing would be extremely unprofessional”, to which Alan replied (tongue in cheek, I assume) that I am therefore officially a “gifted amateur”.

By implication, freelance translators in general are “gifted amateurs”, a label that we might not all be happy with. (Yes, yes, I could say “a label with which we might not all be happy”. But I won’t.)

It struck me that this kind of misjudgement happens most easily when we try to analyze a field by sheer conceptual juggling, rather than referring to the phenomena that are out there. As the word “phenomenological” crossed my mind, I was further struck by the parallel with the shift from “comparative religion” to “phenomenology of religion”. Those of you who are not familiar with the field may think that “comparative religion” is an innocuous enough term. It might suggest an earnest, open-minded seeker with a clipboard and a checklist (with the results stored, no doubt, in an Excel file), noting that the Woobalists believe in Blongtarraby, while the breakaway Darishnymites assert that Blongtarraby should really be called Longbartnabing. Interesting stuff, eh? The fact is, however, that “comparative religion” got a bad name as it came to be associated with the almost Victorian notion that one could begin with a preconceived hierarchy, into which discoveries could be fitted as they were made. And yes, the top of the pyramid was monotheism, even “triune monotheism” – wouldn’t you just know it! The “phenomenology of religion” was intended to counter this thinking by putting the central focus on religious phenomena, whatever they may be, and only on that basis proceeding to look for underlying patterns or structures.

Well, academics have to make their living out of this, so the whole field is of course complex and subtle, but I am asking Alan to comment on my suggestion that the problem with his chart is a result of working from preconceived notions rather than from business phenomena.

I have now heard from a number of sources confirming the rather unsurprising suspicion that the GFC is having a significant, negative effect on the freelance translating trade. It could hardly be otherwise. And yet I see no reason to start doubting the accepted wisdom that translations are not primarily sold on price. Of course, anybody can price themselves out of the market, and I dare say that in a tighter financial climate this mistake is easier to make. Surely, however, the various aspects concerning quality, reliability, trustworthiness and so on are as important as they ever were.

My suspicion is that the agency concerned was simply trying to take advantage of the current situation to exert downward pressure on translators’ rates. They are, after all, in business, and there is nothing particularly wicked about that. I rather doubt, however, whether there would be many of us who would now say that they first noticed a drop in demand over the last six or twelve months, then compensated for that by dropping fees, and now find themselves as much in demand as they were, say, in the first half of 2008. This would, it seems to me, imply that the translation market is as responsive to price as the retail markets for petrol or sliced white bread. That seems unlikely, but I’d be interested to hear from anybody who wants to argue that I am wrong.